You’re living in Sub-Saharan Africa during a drought entering its second year. The diminished harvests have left you without enough food, and your family is trying to figure out how to get by. You’ve settled on selling some of your livestock and securing a small loan to help cover the cost of food, confident that you’ll be able to recover quickly and repay your debt.

Some of your friends, however, have less wealth than you. If they sell their last two cattle, it could be a long time before they could afford to replace them. And given that their annual income is highly variable, they can’t risk taking out a loan they may not be able to pay back. So rather than dig themselves into a potentially inescapable hole, they eat less and go hungry. Some of those families have growing children, but they see no other way.

In situations like these, those in poverty can be significantly more vulnerable than their wealthier counterparts. When you have little, your flexibility to deal with unpredictable crises is limited.

The last Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, in 2007, recognized the fact that those in poverty around the world would suffer a disproportionate share of many climate change impacts, but it didn’t dig much deeper. The new report devotes an entire chapter to research on how climate change will interact with the realities of poverty.

Poverty isn’t just about income, though that’s the most common metric. Social inequality (along ethnic, class, or gender lines, for example) can make certain segments of a population similarly vulnerable. But economically, about 1.2 billion people fall below the International Poverty Line of $1.25/day. Another estimate based on factors like access to schooling and clean water puts the number at more like 1.7 billion.

There are a great many problems these people might face, like disease, war, scarce employment, social discrimination, and unstable governments. The report describes climate change as a “threat multiplier” capable of adding stress that exacerbates other hardships.

Weather trends can force agricultural shifts, like trading crops for livestock in areas where rainfall is decreasing. Some may try to pick up employment on the side or even give up on farming entirely. And weather extremes, of course, have major agricultural impacts. A poor harvest can raise food prices at the same time that it puts agricultural laborers out of work. The more unpredictable next year’s yields are, the less risk a poor farmer can afford to take. That can mean sticking with meager but dependable options rather than taking a chance on something that could significantly boost income.

Heat waves can also limit the productivity of laborers (aside from the health consequences). Reductions in income, for this or other reasons, can mean pulling children out of school, foregoing medical care, or inadequate nutrition—all of which can bring even more problems in the future.

Floods from extreme rainfall events frequently have a bigger impact on the urban poor in some regions, who are unlikely to have insurance but often live in the most vulnerable part of a city. That’s true for areas susceptible to landslides triggered by heavy rains as well, the report says.

Sea level rise, while considerably less sudden than a flash flood, also threatens many poor, low-lying coastal areas and islands. More than 175 million people live on the Ganges-Brahmaputra and Mekong River deltas, for example, where large amounts of food are grown. Rising sea level means worse flooding, invading saltwater, and a loss of land, displacing many and eliminating their livelihoods.

For those who depend on fish and other seafood, climate change and ocean acidification add additional threats to marine and freshwater resources. Climatic changes affecting Africa’s great Lake Tanganyika, for example, have contributed to declining catches.

Can we mitigate the impact?

It’s not just the impacts of climate change that can be uneven; it's the responses, too. Just as the poor can lack the necessary flexibility to deal with hardship, some helpful adaptations, like diversifying sources of income or obtaining crop insurance, can be out of their reach as well.

Some schemes to help mitigate climate change have eyed the poverty bird with stone in hand. For example, one program encourages developed nations to offset some of their greenhouse emissions by investing in sustainable development projects like clean energy for poor communities. A review of 114 of these projects found that less than 10 percent of them actually helped reduce poverty.

The production of biofuels has also been viewed as a potential boon for the poor, providing jobs and economic development in some regions. But the biofuel rush has resulted in many poor farmers having their small plots of farmland bought out by large (often international) entities, pushing them onto less-productive land. The switch from food crops to biofuel crops has impacted food prices in those areas (though it’s unclear by how much). That, of course, is hardest on the poor—especially the urban poor who spend most of their income on food.

Despite mixed returns so far, the report concludes that proper implementation of these and other initiatives does hold real potential for helping the poor while also taking on climate change. In fact, it’s critical that we do both. “Neither alleviating poverty nor decreasing vulnerabilities to climate change can be achieved unless entrenched inequalities are reduced,” the report states.

Because of its threat-multiplying nature in addition to its direct impacts, climate change will make it even more difficult to reduce global poverty. The asymmetry of impacts leads to tension between smaller, poorer nations—who are less responsible for climate change—and larger, wealthier countries in international talks. While developed nations drag their feet on cutting emissions, developing nations are demanding funds to help them deal with the consequences.

Ars Science Video >

A celebration of Cassini

A celebration of Cassini

A celebration of Cassini

Nearly 20 years ago, the Cassini-Huygens mission was launched and the spacecraft has spent the last 13 years orbiting Saturn. Cassini burned up in Saturn's atmosphere, and left an amazing legacy.

77 Reader Comments

Is there any change on a large scale that will not hit the poor more harshly? One very nice part about making a lot of money in a land with infrastructure is a buffer against the world and environment. These are known truths so the real question is...how do we make it attractive (profitable?) to save lives and quality of life at large?

Not really, and the cure for population is... a more developed economy and higher standards of living. It's worked in North America and Europe already and it's beginning to happen in India, Mexico and China.

It's a double edged sword. We've known for years that not only are they the most affected by climate change / extreme weather but that they also contribute the most to it by nature of their relatively high CO2 emissions.

One reason that it makes much sense to push clean/renewable energy solutions into those relatively new energy infrastructures.

Your statement is demonstrably false. The largest CO2 emitters are US and China, with plenty of European countries way up there. Poorer countries in Africa are much much smaller in their emissions. The only major contributor in Africa is South Africa... the wealthiest african nation by far.

Not really, and the cure for population is... a more developed economy and higher standards of living. It's worked in North America and Europe already and it's beginning to happen in India, Mexico and China.

Not really, and the cure for population is... a more developed economy and higher standards of living. It's worked in North America and Europe already and it's beginning to happen in India, Mexico and China.

Welcome to the crowd. Become a big CO2 emitter...just like us.

If the USA shuttered their coal-burning power plants or even just converted to coal gasification plants the CO2 savings would be extreme. But it doesn't look like that's happening anytime soon.

Not really, and the cure for population is... a more developed economy and higher standards of living. It's worked in North America and Europe already and it's beginning to happen in India, Mexico and China.

Welcome to the crowd. Become a big CO2 emitter...just like us.

If the USA shuttered their coal-burning power plants or even just converted to coal gasification plants the CO2 savings would be extreme. But it doesn't look like that's happening anytime soon.

Ironically, the First World's desire to fix its environmental problems can often make things worse for the poor. In the Western world, for example, we eradicated malaria with the help of DDT. Once malaria was gone, we found out that DDT is potentially dangerous to some animals, so we effectively outlawed it. The result is that millions of people die of malaria in sub-Saharan Africa every year. When your young are dying at a high rate, it badly affects economic growth.

Another (counter) example is China. They spent the past 20 years growing their economy like crazy. The result was to move a hundred million (or so) people out of poverty and into the middle class. A part of the engine of that economy was energy -- by way of coal. Had we forced China to stop increasing coal usage (which would have been the only way to make Kyoto work), they would have certainly had much lower growth. The result would have been more people at risk to climate change.

The best way to help the people in extreme poverty to avoid the affects of climate change is probably to help them improve their economies. In some cases (like China) this will mean increased CO2 in the short term. But in the long term they will be more capable of adapting to the climate change that is coming. And it is coming -- thanks to the rich countries (who got that way thanks to fossil fuels).

When evaluating emissions per capita by country, it makes a big difference whether you include land-use change. Deforestation is another consequence of poverty. If you rule out land-use change, naturally it's richer countries that are the biggest emitters, because we use so much more energy.

Ironically, a large number of these "climate-endangered" people--likely most of them--exist today because of the food surpluses and agri/med/tech exports which the developed nations have indiscriminately spread around the world over the 20th century. We created their population boom by giving them both resources and technology which they weren't socially and culturally capable of handling--leading to a population bomb which is exploding in our faces.

I'm as compassionate as anyone when I see these struggling people, but there comes a point when we have to start taking the very long view. We've pumped huge amounts of resources into "fighting world poverty" since the 1950s, and what we have is an ever-growing number of impoverished people because if you save x borderline people in this generation you get a larger multiple of x borderline people in the next generation since people in developing countries reproduce significantly beyond replacement levels. You can of course get them to slow down by increasing their "quality of life" toward that of the developed world, but that takes tremendously more resources than just a bit of food aid and some IMF loans here and there. I was watching Fareed Zakaria GPS a while ago when they showed a graphic of regional poverty today versus the 1980s--the only significant decline after adjustments was in China, while the rest of the world held steady. If we really want to help alleviate poverty, we should help invest in developing nations' infrastructure--but not in food aid and other short-term charitable measures which actually exacerbate the problem over time.

Likewise, I just can't get too worked up over the way climate change will unequally affect the poor in developing nations. They already exist in such large numbers because of our well-meaning but counterproductive spread of resources throughout the 20th century to people not yet adapted to them. The developed nations cannot handicap their own economic and cultural evolution by either handicapping themselves or allowing themselves to devote significant percentages of GDP to aid which doesn't have direct collateral benefit for themselves, because we're set to go through our own demographic transitions (and importing young foreign workers indefinitely is just a Ponzi scheme which magnifies both our population problems and pending economic problems down the road) and economic shifts. Right now many developed nations--especially the U.S.--are dependent upon a constantly growing economy and a large, cheap-labor workforce, which are unsustainable in the long-term and must go through significant structural transitions toward stable growth and a smaller workforce at some point. The U.S.' current longstanding unemployment trends may not be anomalous and solvable at all, but rather part of a permanent economic shift to which our government and society may have to adjust. Meanwhile, Japan is frequently looked down upon in economic discussions because of their demographic transition and resulting lower overall economic output projections--yet they're adapting well economically, politically, and socially to their new realities, and per-capita worker productivity in Japan is actually at around 200% of that in other developed nations.

The developing nations have problems which are obvious and garner sympathy. But the developed nations have our own problems which are less visible and don't pull at the heartstrings, but will be far more important to the future course of the world at large. How we handle our own demographic and economic transitions may determine whether the developed world continues to make "progress" toward being a "civilization of plenty" where limited resources aren't a constant source of conflict, or falls back toward the same "civilization of scarcity" which characterizes the developing world. The future not just of the billions of poor who are alive today and in the next couple of generations, but of the hundreds of billions or (hopefully) trillions of people who will be humanity's descendants overall, is what's at stake. We do have finite resources at any given time, and if we use too many to alleviate poverty at the bottom and not enough to continue our technological and cultural development at the top--civilizational collapses have happened before and they can happen again; and if they happen after we've used up most of the easily-utilized fossil fuels but before we've developed both technological and cultural infrastructure to sustain stable developed nations on renewable energy sources, human civilization will return to a state of permanent scarcity and conflict.

Not really, and the cure for population is... a more developed economy and higher standards of living. It's worked in North America and Europe already and it's beginning to happen in India, Mexico and China.

Welcome to the crowd. Become a big CO2 emitter...just like us.

If the USA shuttered their coal-burning power plants or even just converted to coal gasification plants the CO2 savings would be extreme. But it doesn't look like that's happening anytime soon.

I don't think you understand the words "contribute the most to it" even though you used them.

Middle and low income countries make up more than half of the world's CO2 emissions. Their growth is accelerating while high income countries growth is decelerating. Many developing countries have a higher output per person than many developed countries. That will also increase.

Not really, and the cure for population is... a more developed economy and higher standards of living. It's worked in North America and Europe already and it's beginning to happen in India, Mexico and China.

I don't know why anyone would downvote you, this has been proven over and over. But you left one out: Education. As both income levels and education levels rise, especially for women, families have fewer children.

Note the implication here: Since we know that educating women and increasing economic levels will lead to smaller families, a society with values that keep women poor and uneducated seriously encourages overpopulation.

I suspect failures in the land will also affect the movement of people into the cities, bringing it's own set of problems.

It isn't just that. Refugees will also go to cities in developed countries. If you're complaining about overpopulation and immigration into your own First World city, be aware that the best way to keep people from moving to your nice city is to help conditions improve in other parts of the world. Taking the attitude "I've got mine, screw them" can lead to "them" coming to where you are as things get worse where they came from. But if they're happy and prosperous where they are, they won't need or want to leave.

This issue is why I don't like analysis of the impacts of climate change that are based primarily on GDP and economic impacts. GDP is just the value of all goods and services bought in the economy, and analyzing something like climate change will lowball the impacts on the poor (they buy fewer goods and services anyways), and highball the impacts on the wealthy. Over two billion people make less than a dollar a day, and they barely show up on the GDP radar, but eat a lot of the costs of climate change. If you added in these effects on the poor then there is a much stronger argument for abating climate change. Another huge problem in estimates of the cost of climate change is the use of discounting in climate change analysis. This method is pretty common in accounting, and makes sense for financial investments, but when applied to climate change serves to lowball estimates of harms to future generations.

The IPCC gives an literature review of attempts to measure the cost of CO2 emissions here http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_dat ... 20-es.html , and the estimates that attempt to adjust for climate change impacts on the poor that are disproportionate to their income, and don't use discounting can reach some very scary numbers (with one reaching $1500/ ton of CO2).

I don't think you understand the words "contribute the most to it" even though you used them.

Middle and low income countries make up more than half of the world's CO2 emissions. Their growth is accelerating while high income countries growth is decelerating. Many developing countries have a higher output per person than many developed countries. That will also increase.

Most of the manufacturing done by those in the middle is making goods for which countries? Five bucks says it's not the poor ones, er go while you can blame the middle producers for the gasses it's filling the top sides' appetite that is the true cause

That's not how sociopaths work. It's more like "Doing X brings me Y" where Y is some combination of riches, power, or whatever. There is no "and hurts Z" portion of the equation. They simply aren't wired to care one way or the other.

Once malaria was gone, we found out that DDT is potentially dangerous to some animals, so we effectively outlawed it. The result is that millions of people die of malaria in sub-Saharan Africa every year.

While this is off-topic, I have to ask, how does "effectively outlawing" DDT in the U.S. have any affect on sub-Saharan Africa?

Once malaria was gone, we found out that DDT is potentially dangerous to some animals, so we effectively outlawed it. The result is that millions of people die of malaria in sub-Saharan Africa every year.

While this is off-topic, I have to ask, how does "effectively outlawing" DDT in the U.S. have any affect on sub-Saharan Africa?

In the end, we used DDT indiscriminately, and mosquitos developed resistance to it. DDT's use has dropped simply because it's ineffective.

This issue is why I don't like analysis of the impacts of climate change that are based primarily on GDP and economic impacts. GDP is just the value of all goods and services bought in the economy, and analyzing something like climate change will lowball the impacts on the poor (they buy fewer goods and services anyways), and highball the impacts on the wealthy. Over two billion people make less than a dollar a day, and they barely show up on the GDP radar, but eat a lot of the costs of climate change. If you added in these effects on the poor then there is a much stronger argument for abating climate change.

Perhaps. OTOH, it somewhat balances out because it lowballs the impact on the poor efforts to abate climate change. Consider biofuels, mentioned in the article. If one of the rich country ways to address CO2 production is to switch from hydrocarbons to biofuels, and that increases the price of food for the poor, then they'll bear a disproportionate cost of the abatement as well, and, similarly, that smaller dollar figure in food price increases will hurt them more than a somewhat larger dollar figure in food prices for rich countries.

Similarly, oil and other hydocarbons have a world price. If rich countries use less oil because they raise the price through taxes, then in the short run the price declines and is used elsewhere. If, wanting to focus on total worldwide emissions by reducing hydrocarbon consumption, oil and other hydrocarbons are left in the ground and become more expensive for everyone, that probably hurts poor countries and poor people again more. Rich people and countries (and basically everyone in the USA is rich by this global measure) have more room to cut back, and they can outbid poor ones for using the remaining supply.

There are ways to carefully construct CO2 emission abatement so that it doesn't hurt poor countries-- which is what poorer countries naturally ask for-- but it's not guaranteed, and many of the obvious ways to address CO2 emissions will hurt poorer countries worse, and the same concern you have with GDP works there too, making it easy to underestimate the cost to the poor of those abatement tactics. (Similarly, it's possible to offer more aid and redistribution to poor countries without aiding with climate change. The two issues are almost orthogonal.)

Once malaria was gone, we found out that DDT is potentially dangerous to some animals, so we effectively outlawed it. The result is that millions of people die of malaria in sub-Saharan Africa every year.

While this is off-topic, I have to ask, how does "effectively outlawing" DDT in the U.S. have any affect on sub-Saharan Africa?

I believe that the form of the argument normally given is that after restrictions were passed in the US, USAID and other foreign aid bodies refused to fund the purchase of DDT, despite any requests from sub-Saharan African governments. There's a lot of room to pick apart that claim, so I'm not endorsing it, but that is what I assume the poster alluded to.

It's a double edged sword. We've known for years that not only are they the most affected by climate change / extreme weather but that they also contribute the most to it by nature of their relatively high CO2 emissions.

One reason that it makes much sense to push clean/renewable energy solutions into those relatively new energy infrastructures.

Your statement is demonstrably false. The largest CO2 emitters are US and China, with plenty of European countries way up there. Poorer countries in Africa are much much smaller in their emissions. The only major contributor in Africa is South Africa... the wealthiest african nation by far.

Climate change hits the poor harder, and it's a problem created by wealthier nations.

I don't think you understand the word "relatively". Also clear you didn't click the link to the Economist piece, which explains it and even gives some examples. And the trend will continue to increase for those countries as their economies expand even as America and other developed nations reduce their total output.

The Economist piece CLEARLY shows (you even cited the graph that makes it so plainly obvious) that the poorer nations are not the issue. Lumping in "and middle-income countries" really skews the picture. In relation to poor countries, the same piece has this to say: "As it is, they bear an even greater share, though their citizens' carbon footprints are much smaller (see chart 2)."

So I'm not really sure why you're citing it, given your original argument and how it seems to be a response to this article about poorer countries, not medium income ones.

Also, as pointed out above, most of the carbon usage in lower medium income and poorer countries is a by-product of less stringent import/export controls, less stringent off-shoring controls, and related consumptive demand by wealthier nations. In other words, we have a number of countries paying lip service to fixing carbon issues but unwilling to actually institute controls that keep their own industries operating locally and under those controls when and where it counts.

If you work via strong import controls and development loans to incentivize lower carbon emissions processes (especially in the situations where the long term cost is low once you invest in the better technology/process methods), you could easily help reduce emissions by middle income and lower countries. The World Bank Report that the Economist piece cites for its figures even says that directly in its conclusions, placing the charge to do so where it clearly needs to be: on the world's wealthiest, most consumptive nations.

Ironically, the First World's desire to fix its environmental problems can often make things worse for the poor. In the Western world, for example, we eradicated malaria with the help of DDT. Once malaria was gone, we found out that DDT is potentially dangerous to some animals, so we effectively outlawed it. The result is that millions of people die of malaria in sub-Saharan Africa every year. When your young are dying at a high rate, it badly affects economic growth.

From what I read, climate change is largely polar warming with little equatorial temperature change. Won’t this shield the majority of the poor from the effects?

Condensed one-sentence answer: Warming at the poles contributes the most to potential sea level rise, and it's not just the cities of the rich that lie near coasts--the cities, villages, and breadbaskets of the poor do too; additionally, adding more energy into the climate system will make it more volatile and less stable and predictable in its patterns overall, not just at the places where the immediate changes are most extreme.

All that said, for the reasons I mentioned in my post above I still don't think there's a lot the developed nations both can and should do about it that would really help the developing nations avoid the brunt of climate change. We have our own very serious economic, demographic, and sociocultural issues to worry about, and either handicapping ourselves too much or devoting too many resources to helping the developing world could reduce our own chances of developing a stable, sustainable "civilization of plenty."

The disproportionate impacts of climate change on the poor in developing countries is fairly clear. Additionally, many of the impacts on the developed world are somewhat exaggerated when we overlay practical historical realities on the statistics--for example, much of the threatened developed-world infrastructure would be replaced anyway over the centuries-long timespans of climate projections, and in land-rich nations like the U.S. it'll be trivial to slowly relocate all but the most significant bits (like say, Manhattan) over time while factoring in the new realities. How much unreconstructed 200-year-old infrastructure do we actually use in places like the U.S. out of necessity, rather than convenience? Many of our most populous cities today either didn't exist, or were relatively minor settlements, 200 years ago while many of the major cities of that era are minor backwaters today. Almost all of the buildings in threatened cities would be replaced over these timeframes anyway; it's just a matter of relocating this infrastructure elsewhere over many decades to centuries, which is easily managed (in the U.S. at least--older cities in land-limited Europe will have to invest significantly in coastal fortifications).

There's often a moral argument made, that because the developed nations are responsible for emitting most of the greenhouse gases so far, that we must be responsible for paying for climate mitigation. This falls flat when we look at projections, though, which place the developed nations on trajectories which lower our relative greenhouse gas emissions while the developing world ramps up. The developed world's aggregate emissions over 2 centuries will soon be surpassed and then even pale in comparison because of the developing world's huge population (which, as mentioned in my previous post, exists largely because of economic and food aid from the developed world), despite any efforts we could realistically make to try to convince the developing world to slow its growth and rely more on sustainable fuels. We may have started a campfire which burned slightly out of control--but we now have it under control and are slowly putting it out; it's now up to the developing world whether they keep throwing fuel on it until it becomes a massive forest fire, or whether they choose to keep it under control. It's no longer our moral responsibility since we've gotten our own use in hand and on a trajectory towards renewable fuels, and because most of the climate-threatened poor even exist in the first place because the developed world's largesse and resource surplus was used irresponsibly by the developing world. Continuing to give subsidies--and ever-larger ones, in the name of climate change--may hurt our development through impending tough economic and demographic transitions a lot more than it helps them. What would the creation of a sustainable and stable "civilization of plenty" in the developed nations, to displace the "civilizations of scarcity" and constant conflicts over resources which have dominated history so far, be worth to the future of humanity? The suffering of billions is terrible--and will continue indefinitely throughout the generations unless and until we can replace resource scarcity with sustainable abundance and stability. This will necessarily require developed nations to focus resources on economic, political, and cultural reform within, not without.

I have lived in Sub-Saharan Africa for 40 years, my ancestors for probably 400 years. There have been droughts and shortages worse than this. A drought entering it's second year is really very common. I have seen longer droughts. Our forefathers have seen worse.

The new problem here is not global warming. It is that people are forced to live in areas where they cannot handle the droughts.

I have lived in Sub-Saharan Africa for 40 years, my ancestors for probably 400 years. There have been droughts and shortages worse than this. A drought entering it's second year is really very common. I have seen longer droughts. Our forefathers have seen worse.

The new problem here is not global warming. It is that people are forced to live in areas where they cannot handle the droughts.

Are you saying that the global change problem is being exaggerated by exploiting a common occurring climate condition in the Sub-Saharan region? And that we should take your word for it just because you and your ancestors are from this region? Bah!

Sergei, I find your shallow take on development economics rather offensive. I don't have the time or the inclination to go through it point by point right now, but suffice to say that rich countries have taken a lot more resources than they've provided to poor countries. A statement like "the developing world's huge population... exists largely because of economic and food aid from the developed world" is ridiculous. A misguided focus on food aid over other forms of development has simply been down to what's most convenient for us, but there was never any prospect of our bags of surplus rice significantly altering population trajectories in poor countries, however devoutly you might desire their starvation. We do not need to keep ripping them off in the name of nobly hoping to provide some miracle cure to global warming. This "white man's burden" stuff was laughable a hundred years ago.

This issue is why I don't like analysis of the impacts of climate change that are based primarily on GDP and economic impacts. GDP is just the value of all goods and services bought in the economy, and analyzing something like climate change will lowball the impacts on the poor (they buy fewer goods and services anyways), and highball the impacts on the wealthy. Over two billion people make less than a dollar a day, and they barely show up on the GDP radar, but eat a lot of the costs of climate change. If you added in these effects on the poor then there is a much stronger argument for abating climate change.

Perhaps. OTOH, it somewhat balances out because it lowballs the impact on the poor efforts to abate climate change. Consider biofuels, mentioned in the article. If one of the rich country ways to address CO2 production is to switch from hydrocarbons to biofuels, and that increases the price of food for the poor, then they'll bear a disproportionate cost of the abatement as well, and, similarly, that smaller dollar figure in food price increases will hurt them more than a somewhat larger dollar figure in food prices for rich countries.

Even if biofuels had better economic and envrionmental impacts, the ammount of energy that could be produced is pretty small on a global scale.

True. I agree that the effects on the poor need to be taken in to account when measuring the cost of all energy sources. The effects of biofuels on global food prices has been pretty catastrophic, and trying to expand their production has probabilty been the worst energy policy mistake made in a while. Its not even particulary good at fixing global warming. When the CO2 produced due to land use changes is taken into account, and greenhouse gasses produced as a byproduct of agraculture such as nitrous oxide are measured, biodiesel is probably the most greenhouse gas intensive fuel in use. And bioethanol is a close second ( See http://www.monbiot.com/2005/12/06/worse ... ssil-fuel/ ). Most biofuels are worse for the environment than oil, or coal.

Similarly, oil and other hydocarbons have a world price. If rich countries use less oil because they raise the price through taxes, then in the short run the price declines and is used elsewhere. If, wanting to focus on total worldwide emissions by reducing hydrocarbon consumption, oil and other hydrocarbons are left in the ground and become more expensive for everyone, that probably hurts poor countries and poor people again more. Rich people and countries (and basically everyone in the USA is rich by this global measure) have more room to cut back, and they can outbid poor ones for using the remaining supply.

I don't think this is very likely. If major oil buyers cut back, then oil producers are going to try to sell what they have to those who are still buying. If oil is being left in the ground it will be because the (after tax) price of oil has fallen so low that it isn't worth it to extract.

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There are ways to carefully construct CO2 emission abatement so that it doesn't hurt poor countries-- which is what poorer countries naturally ask for-- but it's not guaranteed, and many of the obvious ways to address CO2 emissions will hurt poorer countries worse, and the same concern you have with GDP works there too, making it easy to underestimate the cost to the poor of those abatement tactics. (Similarly, it's possible to offer more aid and redistribution to poor countries without aiding with climate change. The two issues are almost orthogonal.)

There are however a lot more ways to deploy clean energy in a way that minimizes the impact on poor nations (nuclear!). And, keep in mind that a transition to clean energy is going to be in our future anyways, even ignoring climate change, because our supply of the fuels are running out.

Are you saying that the global change problem is being exaggerated by exploiting a common occurring climate condition in the Sub-Saharan region? And that we should take your word for it just because you and your ancestors are from this region? Bah!

Ironically, a large number of these "climate-endangered" people--likely most of them--exist today because of the food surpluses and agri/med/tech exports which the developed nations have indiscriminately spread around the world over the 20th century. We created their population boom by giving them both resources and technology which they weren't socially and culturally capable of handling--leading to a population bomb which is exploding in our faces.

I'm as compassionate as anyone when I see these struggling people, but there comes a point when we have to start taking the very long view. We've pumped huge amounts of resources into "fighting world poverty" since the 1950s, and what we have is an ever-growing number of impoverished people because if you save x borderline people in this generation you get a larger multiple of x borderline people in the next generation since people in developing countries reproduce significantly beyond replacement levels. You can of course get them to slow down by increasing their "quality of life" toward that of the developed world, but that takes tremendously more resources than just a bit of food aid and some IMF loans here and there. I was watching Fareed Zakaria GPS a while ago when they showed a graphic of regional poverty today versus the 1980s--the only significant decline after adjustments was in China, while the rest of the world held steady. If we really want to help alleviate poverty, we should help invest in developing nations' infrastructure--but not in food aid and other short-term charitable measures which actually exacerbate the problem over time.

Likewise, I just can't get too worked up over the way climate change will unequally affect the poor in developing nations. They already exist in such large numbers because of our well-meaning but counterproductive spread of resources throughout the 20th century to people not yet adapted to them. The developed nations cannot handicap their own economic and cultural evolution by either handicapping themselves or allowing themselves to devote significant percentages of GDP to aid which doesn't have direct collateral benefit for themselves, because we're set to go through our own demographic transitions (and importing young foreign workers indefinitely is just a Ponzi scheme which magnifies both our population problems and pending economic problems down the road) and economic shifts. Right now many developed nations--especially the U.S.--are dependent upon a constantly growing economy and a large, cheap-labor workforce, which are unsustainable in the long-term and must go through significant structural transitions toward stable growth and a smaller workforce at some point. The U.S.' current longstanding unemployment trends may not be anomalous and solvable at all, but rather part of a permanent economic shift to which our government and society may have to adjust. Meanwhile, Japan is frequently looked down upon in economic discussions because of their demographic transition and resulting lower overall economic output projections--yet they're adapting well economically, politically, and socially to their new realities, and per-capita worker productivity in Japan is actually at around 200% of that in other developed nations.

The developing nations have problems which are obvious and garner sympathy. But the developed nations have our own problems which are less visible and don't pull at the heartstrings, but will be far more important to the future course of the world at large. How we handle our own demographic and economic transitions may determine whether the developed world continues to make "progress" toward being a "civilization of plenty" where limited resources aren't a constant source of conflict, or falls back toward the same "civilization of scarcity" which characterizes the developing world. The future not just of the billions of poor who are alive today and in the next couple of generations, but of the hundreds of billions or (hopefully) trillions of people who will be humanity's descendants overall, is what's at stake. We do have finite resources at any given time, and if we use too many to alleviate poverty at the bottom and not enough to continue our technological and cultural development at the top--civilizational collapses have happened before and they can happen again; and if they happen after we've used up most of the easily-utilized fossil fuels but before we've developed both technological and cultural infrastructure to sustain stable developed nations on renewable energy sources, human civilization will return to a state of permanent scarcity and conflict.

Some staggeringly ignorant word salad there, champ. The first world are largely responsible for the developed world actually needing that assistance, full stop. Everything from the shitty border creations and exploitation of the past few centuries, to first-world corporations (mining, constructions firms, etc...) currently using bribes to acquire lucrative development/extraction contracts that are destructive to these countries' economies. The key to helping them isn't to stop giving them resources, it's to stop ruining them, e.g. by punishing corporations that cross borders to avoid paying fair wages and complying with environmental protection laws.

You are extrapolating a whole lot from very little, and doing it poorly. E.g. "But the developed nations have our own problems which are less visible and don't pull at the heartstrings, but will be far more important to the future course of the world at large." And then you go on about needing to reallocate our charity to developing new tech. Ugh. See, you almost had it there (I'll ignore how you seem to believe that aid and innovation are mutually exclusive) ...as was stated in the article, the first world's problems are actually incredibly important because they affect the rest of the world (and create even bigger problems elsewhere). And our biggest problems, by far, are our greed and unwillingness to make do with [a little bit] less. Not our lack of technology.

We have the technology to feed the world, connect the world, and reduce CO2 emissions. We have the ability to help developing countries in meaningful, long-term ways. We're just not doing it. Instead, we feed dictators and corrupt leaders with aid, and watch them do nothing while their people stagnate. But hey, they're opening the doors to our companies, so why bother amirite?

"I don't think this is very likely. If major oil buyers cut back, then oil producers are going to try to sell what they have to those who are still buying. If oil is being left in the ground it will be because the (after tax) price of oil has fallen so low that it isn't worth it to extract. "

IMO, only cooperating countries will try to tax away fossil fuel use. Uncooperative and developing countries would limit taxation to encourage progress. Globally, it won't work. The ME is going to sell their oil and if demand is down the price will drop (I doubt demand ever drops). The rate of demand may decrease but overall demand will not.

Are you saying that the global change problem is being exaggerated by exploiting a common occurring climate condition in the Sub-Saharan region? And that we should take your word for it just because you and your ancestors are from this region? Bah!

You believe what you want. I stated a fact.

I totally believe you. I was being sarcastic. Many will ignore you because it doesn't fit into their climate change impact ideas.